Shortly after 9 o'clock on a Sunday morning in January 2007, Raymond Rodriguez was in his driveway, changing a tyre on his car. Parked close by in the quiet cul-de-sac in Tampa, Florida, was a cherry red Ford Mustang. It belonged to Andre Javage, who had come to visit the night before. Out of nowhere, Rodriguez heard a high-pitched whistling. Then a 13-kilogram chunk of ice landed smack on the roof of Javage's Ford. The windshield blew out and the car bounced, Rodriguez said, a metre into the air. The roof was squashed flat.

A herd of wild elephants on Indonesia's Sumatra has repeatedly outsmarted efforts to stop them stealing crops, wising up to attempts to chase them off with burning torches, a report said Monday.

The head of Way Kambas natural reserve in Lampung province, Hudiono, told the state-run Antara news agency that a herd of 25 to 30 elephants had been nightly roaming out of the reserve to raid crops since Thursday.

World temperatures will cool slightly in 2008, but it will remain among the top 10 hottest years on record, British weather experts predicted Thursday.

The impact of a strong La Nina climate pattern over the Pacific will help keep temperatures down, according to the annual forecast by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia.

Overall the global temperature is expected to be 0.37 degree Celsius above the long-term average of 14.0 degree, making it the coolest year since 2000 when the value was 0.24 degree C above the average.